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ElevenLabs builds AI audio models for lifelike speech synthesis, voice cloning, and multilingual dubbing, delivered through a developer platform, consumer apps, and an enterprise voice-agent stack.
Notable milestones from ElevenLabs’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing.
ElevenLabs partnered with Google DeepMind to embed SynthID watermarks into generated audio, starting with free Text to Speech users before expanding across all audio generations. The company paired the rollout with a free Audio Detector, making attribution a repeatable provenance check instead of a guess by ear.
ElevenLabs committed to hiring 173 people across California in research, engineering, sales and other roles, backed by a California Competes Tax Credit award. The expansion made San Francisco and Los Angeles its primary California hubs while adding state-level work on public-service accessibility and AI-safety efforts.
SourceThe Polish government invested in ElevenLabs through Vinci, part of BGK Group, joining investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and ICONIQ. The company paired the stake with AI Lab Poland, a joint initiative to connect capital, technology, science, and Polish AI talent with partners including Centrum e-Zdrowia, LOT Polish Airlines, InPost, and the University of Warsaw.
ElevenLabs signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore voice AI for public-service accessibility, extend AI security research, and support voice-and-audio AI talent. Alongside the deal, it committed to a new London headquarters three times larger than its old office and to doubling UK headcount to 200.
SourceElevenLabs said annual recurring revenue crossed $500M in the first four months of 2026, less than a year after it reported $330M for all of 2025. The growth came alongside a third close of its Series D and was driven by enterprise deployment of voice agents across support, sales, hiring and marketing.
SourceSequoia Capital led a $500M round that more than tripled the valuation to $11B, with Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ doubling down and Nvidia among backers. It took total funding past $780M as ElevenLabs leaned into enterprise voice agents and signaled an eventual IPO.
Sequoia Capital
Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth co-led a $180M round that tripled the valuation to $3.3B in a year, with NEA, Sequoia and Salesforce Ventures joining — funding the push into dubbing studios, audiobooks, and voice agents.
Andreessen Horowitz, 
ICONIQ
ElevenLabs opened a developer platform for building low-latency voice agents — stitching speech-to-text, an LLM, and its own voices into interactive bots for support, sales, and phone lines. It became the company's enterprise growth engine.
Andreessen Horowitz led an $80M round that vaulted the valuation past $1.1B — a more than tenfold jump in seven months — with Sequoia, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross joining as the voice-AI race accelerated.
Andreessen HorowitzThe dubbing tool re-voiced any video or audio across more than 20 languages while preserving the original speaker's voice, tone, and timing — aiming squarely at the cost and latency of human dubbing studios.
SourceMonths after launch, Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross co-led a $19M round at roughly a $100M valuation, backing the platform and its new AI Speech Classifier for detecting cloned audio.
Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, Daniel GrossThe beta platform let anyone clone a voice from a short sample. It went viral within days; just as quickly, 4chan users cloned celebrities saying vile things, forcing ElevenLabs into an early, public reckoning with voice-AI safeguards.
SourceMati Staniszewski (ex-Palantir) and Piotr Dąbkowski (ex-Google ML engineer), who grew up together in Poland, founded ElevenLabs after years of watching American films butchered by lifeless dubbing — betting they could make synthetic speech sound genuinely human.
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